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Sauvik Banerjjee - Vice President Tata Digital Initiatives, and CTO, of Tata CliQ joined Shiladitya Mukhopadhyaya and Amit Doshi to discuss the transition with brand technology for e-commerce in India, and the startup-corporate equation. They initially talk about Sauvik’s journey through coding in the mid-90s, his experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP) to getting brick and mortar back in shape with Tata CliQ. This conversation then focuses on how technology deployment is instrumental in filling the gaps for the retail industry. To make this point clear, Sauvik said:

Retail technologies across the world have very little foot-print of pure tech-play. This actually opens up the door for true digital enterprise-solving day-to-day problems of tech. I’ll give you an example, if you walk into any of the Lifestyle stores in Mumbai, do you know how they count the number of people who walk into the stores? “The clikr,” said Sheladitya. “The watchman has a clikr, so the cliker is the way he counts footfalls. Can you imagine in a day and time when we are talking NL, NLP, AR, VR; retail stores, the biggest of brands have a clicker in a man who is counting footfalls. What I am trying to say is there is always a gap for technology to solve and retail definitely has the biggest gap and the biggest opportunities.

Shiladitya made a point that while e-commerce is a retail front on the web, it is meant to smoothen the supply chain with efficiency. When asked whether the consumer is drawn towards brands from Indian conglomerates, Sauvik says,

You see the Tata Group is this calm but a big elephant. And whenever the big elephant ran the earth shook; whether it was Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Tesla, Tata Communications. To be honest, JRD Tata championed Air India before he gave it away and made it public. And of course, the Reliance Group.

They proceed to talking about the other side of enterprise-tech which is the startup adoption rate and its impact. Sauvik, talks about how big enterprise are running on startup solutions.

The adoption has started. The adoption and mind-space has changed 12 to maybe 15 months back. You will also see in 12 months to 18 to the next 24 months a big success story coming up, post-adoption the impact whether it is a conversion impact or an ROI impact that’s where the bridge between the startup and the enterprise communities will be more spoken about. I think we are in that implementation phase, monitoring observation mode.